Breast Invasive Carcinoma: Correlations between copy number and mRNA expression
Maintained by John Zhang (MD Anderson Cancer Center)
Overview
Introduction

A TCGA sample is profiled to detect the copy number variations and expressions of genes. This pipeline attempts to correlate copy number and expression data of genes across samples to determine if the copy number variations also result in differential expressions. This report contains the calculated correlation coefficients based on measurements of genomic copy number (log2) values and intensity of the expressions of the corresponding feature across patients. High positive/low negative correlation coefficients indicate that genomic alterations result in differences in the expressions of mRNA the genomic regions transcribe.

Summary

The correlation coefficients in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 percentiles are -0.0131, 0.0379, 0.0883, 0.15178, 0.2316, 0.31492, 0.39504, 0.4738, 0.55816, respectively.

Results
Correlation results

Number of genes and samples used for the calculation are shown in Table 1. Figure 1 shows the distribution of calculated correlation coefficients and quantile-quantile plot of the calculated correlation coefficients against a normal distribution. Table 2 shows the top 20 features ordered by the value of correlation coefficients.

Table 1.  Counts of mRNA and number of samples in copy number and expression data sets and common to both

Category Copy number Expression Common
Sample 824 529 503
Genes 29390 17815 15551

Figure 1.  Summary figures. Left: histogram showing the distribution of the calculated correlations across samples for all Genes. Right: QQ plot of the calculated correlations across samples. The QQ plot is used to plot the quantiles of the calculated correlation coefficients against that derived from a normal distribution. Points deviating from the blue line indicate deviation from normality.

Table 2.  Get Full Table Top 20 features (defined by the feature column) ranked by correlation coefficients

feature r p-value q-value chrom start end geneid
CLNS1A 0.8771 0 0 11 77004847 77026495 1207
WHSC1L1 0.8723 0 0 8 38251717 38358947 54904
ATG5 0.8625 0 0 6 106730333 106880361 9474
LSM1 0.8576 0 0 8 38140014 38153183 27257
PPFIA1 0.8571 0 0 11 69794471 69908150 8500
NDUFB9 0.8478 0 0 8 125620531 125631399 4715
BRF2 0.8476 0 0 8 37820558 37826569 55290
ASH2L 0.8383 0 0 8 38082223 38116216 9070
MYST3 0.8328 0 0 8 41907420 42028635 7994
C6orf203 0.8318 0 0 6 107456110 107479238 51250
DDHD2 0.8307 0 0 8 38208264 38238143 23259
MRPL13 0.8259 0 0 8 121477264 121526828 28998
CNOT7 0.8245 0 0 8 17131108 17148758 29883
TM2D2 0.8203 0 0 8 38965484 38973198 83877
TCEB1 0.8196 0 0 8 75021188 75046900 6921
VDAC3 0.8195 0 0 8 42368547 42382572 7419
BAG4 0.8178 0 0 8 38153263 38187694 9530
FADD 0.8161 0 0 11 69726917 69731144 8772
PTK2 0.816 0 0 8 141737683 142080514 5747
FAM91A1 0.8159 0 0 8 124859508 124894263 157769
Methods & Data
Input

Gene level (TCGA Level III) expression data and copy number data of the corresponding loci derived by using the CNTools package of Bioconductor were used for the calculations. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated for each pair of genes shared by the two data sets across all the samples that were common.

Correlation across sample

Pairwise correlations between the log2 copy numbers and expressions of each gene across samples were calculated using Pearson correlation.

Download Results

This is an experimental feature. The full results of the analysis summarized in this report can be downloaded from the TCGA Data Coordination Center.